The Social Graph will liberate the information you have stored in sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo from the confines of these particular web applications and give it back to you, to do whatever you want with it. Found a new social software site that has cool features? Great - just hook it into your personal neighbourhood of the social graph, and it will immediately know who all your friends are. No need to go looking for them. The data belongs to you.

OpenID will be a key component of the Social Graph. OpenID provides a categorical declaration of your online identity, and it is these identities which will form the nodes of the graph, with edges being relationships.

This excellent clip uses graphs of relationships to illustrate social networks:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_KF7TYKVc[/youtube]

What is missing from this explanation is the fact that you have completely separate graphs in each of the social networking sites that you use. The Social Graph will exist independently of any particular site, and the sites will draw upon it to find out about your relationships.

"Why bother" I hear you ask, "if I use Facebook and so do all my mates?" One reason is that innovation is being stifled by the fact that you are stuck in Facebook. What if an infinitely better social networking site comes along? You will be unlikely to use it , because Facebook holds your graph of relationships. Once The Social Graph is implemented, you will be able to use whatever combination of social networking sites you wish, with your choices being made entirely on the basis of their value. Innovation will explode. Exciting times :)

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